The Alchemy of Desire - Tarun J Tejpal

"Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is"

This is how the novel starts and gives you a sneak peek into what the novel is about. A bold, rich in sexuality, sensual novel about art, inspiration and the disintegration of a relationship...

Tarun J Tejpal is famous for the sting operations he and his team conducted in exposing misappropriations in Indian defense deals in his newspaper Tehelka.

Characters: A name less narrator, his wife Fizz, an American lady Catherine, John(Catherine's father), Bibi Lahori, Gaj Singh and Seyd the homosexual nawab, to name a few.

The novel traces the narrator and his wife Fizz's journey from a quiet town to New Delhi, then to a remote corner of the Himalayas. An unexpected inheritance allows them to purchase a country home in the Himalayas.

Here the narrator finds a long-abandoned stack of diaries and becomes absorbed by them, so much so with their content, that the physical fires between the narrator and Fizz get frozen. Fizz flees and the narrator is left to chase the demons of his imagination.

The diaries contains the story about a Chicago woman, Catherine's journey to India from a quite life in Chicago to a freek lifestyle in Paris. After destroying many men and cities she reaches a royal palace in India with a homosexual nawab, seyd. Here she feeds on the retainers who satisfy both the nawab and her.

I was tempted to dump it (unread) in Chandigarh’s Sukhna Lake, like the nameless protagonist in Tarun Tejpal’s novel who drowns his second manuscript. For two reasons: One, V. S. Naipaul commends it as "a new and brilliantly original novel from India" and second i had given it three times and all the three times were coinciding with all time lows in my life. So this time i decided to finish this novel once for all.

The story telling travels in times and chronology that you sometimes get lost. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the narrator and the writer (Tarun himself).

The reason for me to give up three times was that it refuses to progress no matter how much time you spend reading them. The pictures are so very detail that you can recreate the whole story after reading the novel. to name one, he writes for a complete page describing the room where he first met Fizz.

FINALLY I have completed the novel in three long years.